In September, 2013, Bundle of Holding featured a collection of GUMSHOE system games. That bundle has returned for an encore. From now until May 5, you can get a bunch of GUMSHOE PDFs for as little as $13.95.

For that price, you get Ashen Stars, Mutant City Blues, four(!) issues of Ken Writes About Stuff, and the collected See Page XX Volume 1. Beat the threshold price (currently $29.56) and you'll also get Night's Black Agents, The Zalozhniy Quartet (campaign for NBA), Dead Rock Seven (adventure collection for Ashen Stars), Hard Helix (adventure collection for Mutant City Blues), and Fear Itself. That's four complete games, twelve adventures, and dozens of essays and campaign frames from +Robin Laws, +Kenneth Hite, and others for less than $30.

And if you already have most or all of these books, you can purchase the bundle as a gift and still support +Pelgrane Press Ltd's selected charity, Womankind Worldwide. I highly recommend checking out Bundle of Holding for this …

A short post today as I'm stuck with only my iPhone for internet access. Pelgrane Press has an excellent post up today giving an example of combat in Trail of Cthulhu. Check it out to get an idea of how the normal investigative flow of GUMSHOE can break out into frantic action.

Last year at Origins, +Jamie Stefko and I were intrigued by a little booth at the back of the exhibit hall. The sign said "Trekking the National Parks." My wife has a dream of seeing as many of the National Parks as possible, so I nudged her toward the table.

Turns out, Trekking the National Parks is a board game designed by Charlie Bink based on his parents' love of the National Parks and their desire to educate people and particularly families about our nation's wonderful parks system. They were taking pre-orders at Origins in anticipation of a future Kickstarter.

That Kickstarter went off successfully, and the resulting game is beautiful. In addition to a wonderful board featuring all of the National Parks, Trekking also has several sets of cards, attractive glass stones, and the cutest custom meeples I've seen yet — hikers complete with backpacks in six colors.

We got the game before the holidays last year, but we hadn't gotten the chance to pull it out un…

I’ve talked before about the different hooks a game system has to attach mechanical effects to. Specifically, I’ve listed the many available hooks in Fate Core.

Stunts are the most efficient way to leverage mechanical hooks in Fate Core. They can trigger off any number of factors and apply effects to just as many. As I thought about how to make stunts more interesting, I began to imagine stunts that had more than one effect, depending on what hooks were available.

I call the result modal stunts. Modal stunts trigger off of one or more game states (the hooks) and have varying results based on which (or how many) hooks are in play. This makes modal stunts more complicated than the default stunts given in Fate Core, but it also makes them potentially much more interesting to players who enjoy a lot of mechanical crunch.

The simplest type of modal stunt has one effect when a game state is true and another when it is false. Consider a Fate Core game about werewolves who can maintain their …

GURPS Zombies gives you everything you need to run any kind of campaign you like featuring the walking dead. But if what you need is a zombie-filled campaign to run? That's where GURPS Zombies: Day One comes in. In 55 pages, GURPS Line Editor and zombie lover Sean Punch provides eight complete undead-filled campaign settings.

For just $10 you get enough material for years of undead stomping fun. Each campaign frame includes character guidelines, campaign arcs, and pointers to all the rules and options from Zombies you'll need. The campaigns range from dark fantasy and sci-fi survival to Southern Gothic to video game violence (ala Left 4 Dead).